Senior placekicker Cameron Gamble may spend his weekends kicking off for the Tigers, but he spends his time during the week coding and programming computer applications.
Gamble and his classmates, Steven Wong and Tirth Shah, created BarStat, a free app that lists the cover prices, drink specials and gender ratios of different bars near LSU’s campus. BarStat allows students and other bar goers to make a decision on their nightly fun before they even leave the apartment.
The Apple App Store describes it as a Friday night solution for all college students who want to let loose after a long week but cannot decide between all of Tigerland’s bars. BarStat eliminates the possibility of choosing a bar that turns out to be a waste of time and cover charges.
Gamble, a computer science senior, came up with the idea for a class project in the spring of 2017. What he did not know was that both he and Wong, who was working separately on the same project, had the exact same idea. They did not even meet until about three weeks ago.
“Through the summer, I stopped working on it because of my other business,” Gamble said. “I found out like three week ago that Steven was actually working on it too. One of my mutual friends knew one of the guys that was working on the app too with him. So I got in contact with Tirth, he’s the CEO, and then I talked to him and everything and I joined the team.”
Gamble, Wong, Shah, construction management junior Mark Segalla and finance junior Jeff Vaccaro have developed BarStat from a simple class project to a fully functioning, interactive app.
They have been working non-stop for weeks, hoping to roll out some big new features, including “user interface” changes to what the app looks like and premium features like in-app purchases.
“We have this thing called leaderboards, so people get points if they go out to certain bars or anything,” Gamble said. “That’s one of the things that we’re really excited about. And then we have line-leap that we’re going to come out with too, which is going to make it able to skip the entire line.
They plan on keeping BarStat free in the app store after the upcoming changes, but in-app purchases like the line-leap will add an extra fee to the cover charge.
After being released in the summer and undergoing multiple updates, BarStat is already off to a good start after going viral on Facebook. The team plans to grow the app and spread it to other college campuses.
This hasn’t been Gamble’s first time dealing with coding and programming. Gamble said that he has always loved computers and coding, despite changing his major twice before landing in computer science. He even programmed and created his own sophisticated website using HTML codes when he was in middle school.
“When I came into school, I was a pre-med major, because I wanted to be a neurologist,” Gamble said. “But after the first semester, I realized that this was not the thing for me so I switched to human pre-med, which is more like around sports science and stuff. Then I was still like this is not for me, so then I switched to computer science.”
Gamble said that once he made the final switch to computer science he fell in love with it.
“Within like the first two days of my first computer science class, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is it. I love it,’’’ Gamble said. “It’s funny because all my friends say they don’t like coding. I have a couple of engineering friends and they have to do some coding in their classes and they hate it. I’m just like, ‘How do y’all hate this, this is awesome.’”